~ Meditations

Category Archives: sport

Note: Kaaka is crow in Thamizh and this is how my father referred to Martin Crowe when we were watching the 1992 World Cup where, as a seven year old wide eyed boy madly in love in cricket, I was first introduced to Martin Crowe. Apart from his elegant batting, his head band was beautifully elegant; in these days of machismo, it seems to be hard to find the kind of delicate elegance embodied by Crowe. Also, the decency with which he played the game; let’s throw out all sledging and unwanted talk under the name of banter.

To see one of the greatest batsman say this:

To see the two sons I never had, Ross Taylor and Marty Guptill, run out in black, in sync with their close comrades, drawing on all their resolve and resilience, will be mesmerically satisfying. I will hold back tears all day long. I will gasp for air on occasions. I will feel like a nervous parent.

And let us not forget his innovative cricket max. I think it is a great concept: 10 overs two innings. (Also, let’s not forget SRT’s suggestion that ODI’s split into two innings of 25 overs each)

Symbolically, the very audacity of Serena Williams—a black woman from Compton who has owned a country-club sport with style, flair, and the occasional leopard suit, is without comparison. She is “peak Tiger Woods” in skill, but cut with Ali’s transgressive style: the equivalent of the Champ telling the craggy, macho world of boxing that he was “so very pretty.” But not even Ali had to achieve in an atmosphere as inhospitable as Serena’s athletic setting. This is about the very particular intersectional oppression she has faced as a black woman.

Then there are her explicit politics. This is not the 1960s and there isn’t a mass movement to deify Serena Williams the way there was one to lift Ali, when the world was insistent upon his destruction. But that only makes the stands she has chosen to take all the more remarkable. In 2000, Serena Williams pulled out of the Family Circle Cup in South Carolina in solidarity with the NAACP’s call to boycott over the flying of the Confederate flag atop the state house. After her Wimbledon victory Saturday, she spoke about the recent “Mother Emmanuel” Church murders in Charleston, calling it a “tragedy yet again,” and an “unspeakably sad” moment that takes its “toll.” However, she pledged to “continue to have faith, continue to believe, continue to be positive, continue to help people to the best of [my] ability.”

She has been a voice for women’s pay equity in the sport, backing her sister Venus’s powerful push for economic gender justice in a sport that at one time paid women with bouquets of flowers. Most compellingly, as the Black Lives Matter movement has attempted to focus the nation on both police violence and the injustices that surround our system of mass incarceration, Serena has chosen to partner with the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that fights for prisoners’ rights amid the racism that pervades our criminal-justice system. In a move as audacious as it was affecting, she even tied her return to Indian Wells, a tournament she had boycotted after being showered with racist catcalls in 2001, to the raising of money for the organization. Using boxing as a platform for these kinds of politics amidst the 1960s was certainly legendary. But doing it in 2015 in the world of tennis? It’s simply above and beyond, like clearing a hurdle while wearing cement shoes

Everybody seems to agree that CLR James’Beyond a Boundary is the greatest sports book ever written. A beautiful book indeed, with chapter titles like: the welfare state of the mind, the art and the practic part etc; One can write pages about this book. If you love sport of any kind or want to see how sport relates to the outside world, this is the book to read. But one can also argue that it is a “heavy” tome in some sense, filled with scholarly references and rich allusions. A wonderful counterpart to this book is Football in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano who sadly passed away a while back. This book manages to convey the same beauty and pathos that James’ wanted to in a silken little book in such a deft, delicate way without using bombastic words or abstruse philosophy. A Zen like minimalism compared to James’ labyrinthine work.

The latest post on it is a review of Dave Zirin’s book: Brazil’s Dance With the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy.

Zirin identifies a clear pattern in World Cups and Olympic games of recent years. Again and again, these events witness mass evictions, social cleansing (in which the poor, the homeless, drug addicts, and others are removed from sight), gentrification, the corporatization of public space, the erosion of civil liberties, and a massive increase in surveillance and “security.” Vast public subsidies pour into private hands as host cities are reshaped to the advantage of the rich. It’s always a boon for construction, real estate, security, and media interests, but often a tragedy for the communities left behind. As Zirin observes, these mega-events provide elites with “something that couldn’t be found at the end of a military-grade truncheon: the consent of the masses to neoliberal policy goals.”